The part of my job that is least satisfying is the increasing demand to translate teaching and learning in the humanities into numbers so that others can determine our success or failure. This is difficult to do, at best, and inevitably causes the loss of important aspects of what happens in the classroom as well as the depth and breadth of subject matter.
We aren't making widgets on an assembly line, and students are neither customers nor products. Professors are caught in a bind: We are experts in our discipline and dedicated, experienced teachers, asked to translate everything we do into numbers by people who are typically unfamiliar with both our discipline and teaching itself.
The rest.
Not a one of these proffies mention stapling dicks to the floor. (TWITCH!)
ReplyDeleteUm.. Is that the part you love or the part you hate?
Deletehates when the stapler jams
DeleteBefore MAam beat me to the punch, I was going to say, "YES!!! (Twitch! TWITCH!)"
DeleteDoesn't everyone hate it when the stapler jams?
I'm actually OK with the students-as-products model. It's consistent with the idea that if we let cheaters and slackers slide through the program, that's poor quality control and it devalues the degree for everyone.
ReplyDeleteOf course I teach in a business school, so there's that.
It definitely beats the students-as-customers model, if only because it acknowledges that there are multiple stakeholders: not just the students and their parents, but the community at large, the students' (and parents') future selves, their future employers, their future clients/students/care-receivers/children, etc., etc.
DeleteI find these proffies a bit gumdrop unicorny, in that they seem to under-represent all there is to hate. But that's OK; we can hate enough for them.
ReplyDeleteThere are definitely some gumdrop unicorns in the bunch, but I thought the selection was reasonably balanced: there's an adjunct who loves her work but "couldn't support [her] family on the pay," and "fortunate[ly] do[es]n't have to, and there's a social work professor (apparently also an adjunct, but of the more traditional/appropriate professional-who-teaches-grad-courses type) who complains that some of his students don't read, think, and/or participate, and expect him to work harder than they do. At least for readers with rosy views of what higher ed teaching is/should be (and what the students are like), that's a healthy dose of reality.
ReplyDeleteAnd (not suprisingly) I agree with the English proffie quoted above. As I tell my students who see numbers/quantitative research as somehow more solid or reliable than qualitative analysis (including the sort of textual analysis we do in literature and rhetoric classes): where do they think the numbers come from? More often than not, they're a distillation of responses to words, all too often words on a poorly-designed questionnaire filled out in haste and/or under duress (cf. student evaluations). One can, of course, get good data this way, but it takes a level of thought and effort and pre-testing and revising that's pretty uncommon in most assessment efforts, inside and outside the academy.